


Reaching Beyond

by A Caffeinated Crisis (TabbbyWright)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Canon Compliant, M/M, Post-Canon, for the most part anyway, one sided TakeYusa, tags will be updated but ship tags are end game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:42:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22245793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TabbbyWright/pseuds/A%20Caffeinated%20Crisis
Summary: Chapter 2:The offer had been tempting, honestly, and would’ve been a little more tempting if Yusaku had only disappeared, and notdied. When Ai said it, he felt equal parts hope and horror at the thought of never being apart from Ai again, never experiencing those painful few weeks again. However, he didn’t want to stop being himself, he didn’t want Ai to stop being himself. Ai was Ai and Ai was who he came all that way for, Ai was the person he missed.Takeru has a mission to honor the memory of Flame and his parents, but even with people less afraid of him, even with dating Kiku, a loneliness gnaws at him.Yusaku has a mission to bring Ai back, despite knowing the dangers, he won't give up if a chance for a future exists. He'll go wherever, do whatever, until no hope remains.Ryoken has a mission to repair Roboppi, quite possibly the most dangerous mission he's ever taken on.
Relationships: Ai | Ignis/Fujiki Yuusaku, Fujiki Yuusaku & Homura Takeru, Homura Takeru & Kamishirakawa Kiku, Homura Takeru/Revolver | Kougami Ryouken
Comments: 16
Kudos: 33





	1. A Return to Form

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been thinking about this idea since VRAINS ended, and a conversation on Yusaku headcanons (in regards to his parents!) with imaginarystormx is what finally clicked things into place and let me get started on this! Those headcanons won't come up for awhile yet, but look forward to them!
> 
> Also thank you everyone who has read this, read my outline and encouraged me! I'm powered by praise, so it means the world to me!

Ryoken regretted that so much of his data on Yusaku Fujiki was a disjointed mess. It was a patchwork of Yusaku before the incident, the data _from_ the incident, and six months or so of after the incident, and then nothing. Ryoken had lost track of him after that, between changing names and Yusaku falling off the map entirely until he showed up in Den City as Playmaker. It made it hard to figure out much of anything about Yusaku, such as what had happened to his parents. As far as Ryoken knew they were alive, but he had no proof of that besides birth certificates and no records of death. 

But he was confident that they’d scrubbed themselves from existence with their son after the incident. Ryoken knew what he was doing, he knew a lot about tracking people down who didn’t want to be found, but this had proven to be beyond him. He had never been able to find them, or Yusaku in that gap of time and it left so much on Yusaku Fujiki to the imagination. So much left unknown, and so many questions Ryoken didn’t have answers to. 

Yusaku’s apartment building was basic, rough and broken down. He was lucky that Kusanagi trusted him enough (or trusted that Yusaku trusted him anyway) to give him the address of this place, because it had a scattershot of tenants listed and Yusaku’s name was not among them, nor was anyone his age. It was as if Yusaku had never been in Den City at all, despite the mark he left on the city, the world, the people in it. 

Walking with Spectre, they ascended flight after flight of stairs, wood creaking beneath their feet, until they arrived at Yusaku’s unit. Ryoken stood by, keeping an eye out as Spectre picked the lock on the door. He didn’t know where or when Spectre had learned to do that and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Spectre was like this, picking up skills and always managing to surprise Ryoken with whatever new thing he learned. 

There was a _click_ and Ryoken turned to see Spectre putting his tools away and opening the door slowly. Ryoken was pretty sure Yusaku wouldn’t have _security_ in here, given Yusaku’s distaste for violence, but Spectre took the lead anyway. He rarely let Ryoken step through a door first. 

The air was stale, Yusaku long gone, apartment devoid of life. As Ryoken walked in, down the stairs, he took it all in. It was a sad little space, the walls cracking, the only signs of it ever having been lived in was the unmade bed and the husk of the cleaning robot in the corner. He wondered exactly how long Yusaku had lived here, and how long he had been alone. He wondered if the huge windows, completely exposed, no curtains or blinds, were part of why Yusaku chose this particular place. Was it deliberate or a coincidence? He let his gaze look out over the city a bit for a moment, familiar guilt gnawing at his gut. 

He tore his eyes away after a moment and approached the cleaning bot, crouching down and then picking it up carefully. It wasn’t heavy, thankfully, and in flipping the switch experimentally, he found it to be completely and utterly dead. He hoped that there was something salvageable in its internal memory, and that this was just that the battery had been run down to nothing. 

“Ryoken-sama?” 

Ryoken looked up at Spectre at the top of the stairs, unspoken question on his lips. Ryoken made sure he had a firm grip before standing up all the way with it in his arms. 

“It’s nothing. Did you finish?”

“I did.” 

“We can go then.” 

They exited the apartment, Spectre locking the door behind them. Ryoken ran down his list of things to do: he had already paid the landlord to leave the apartment untouched indefinitely, he had the robot, he had the empty SOLtiS. 

He still had many things left to figure out, least of all where Yusaku had _gone_ , but one thing at a time. He didn’t have the means to bring the Dark Ignis back, and he wouldn’t even if he could. Between what had happened before, he also wasn’t confident in his abilities to write a program to modify the _ignis._ He didn’t like to acknowledge anything as being beyond him, but this most certainly was. 

But Yusaku had been lonely, Ryoken knew. The least he could do, as a thank you for saving countless people, was bring _this_ AI back. 

**/ / /**

It was times like this where Takeru was losing focus in class that his thoughts drifted, and he remembered that he wasn’t the same person as when he left. His attendance record had been spotty before, but in the time leading up to learning about Playmaker, it had become particularly abysmal, absences totalling from days to weeks to months. He had been so much more angry before, his focus drifting often to how stupid this was, how much of a waste of time it was, and how none of it mattered because a fight would get the better of him sooner or later. He was either angry or guilty for what he was doing to Kiku and his grandparents, but also constantly hoping that he could drive them away. If they didn’t care about him anymore, then what happened to him _really_ didn’t matter, and no one would be sad if he disappeared. 

But now he was different. He hadn’t really known that he could be good, could be more than a burden, could _want_ to live, and care about what happened tomorrow. It was strange, beyond surreal when he thought about it, startling how so much had changed in just a few short months. 

It made his heart ache, remembering Flame. He missed him, he missed him a lot, he missed him as much as he missed his parents. But that was all the more reason for him to want to live, to honor their memory. 

He hadn’t known exactly what he was looking for or what he was wanting when he went to Den City. Flame had given him a lot of answers to questions that had plagued him over the years, so it wasn’t like he was seeking out much of that. He knew he wanted to meet Playmaker, he knew that he needed to help Flame. He had wanted to try to be someone else, once Flame suggested getting a clean start for awhile. He wasn’t really _into_ being a prim and proper student, but Flame had been right that no one looked at him and was at all threatened. It was weird, the way that people glanced at him then, like he was inconsequential. The way people’s eyes passed over him instead of jerking away, their bodies tensing up. It took getting used to, but he found that he kind of liked it--preferred it. He liked that he could blend in, that no one was frightened by him, that people talked to him now. 

But it was still a bit wrong. He didn’t feel like he was himself, which was a murky concept to him, but he was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to be constantly thinking about how you were carrying yourself to make sure you weren’t carrying yourself _wrong._

After all was said and done, coming home had helped some of this come together. He didn’t present himself _as_ properly as he had in Den City. He let himself relax a bit, he let himself use the pronouns that felt most natural to him. He let himself slouch a bit more. People were still afraid of him, but less so as time wore on. People stopped noticing him so much, stopped caring about him so much. He felt like he was less of a burden when he focused on school and tried to keep himself out of trouble. 

The one thing that hadn’t quite worked out between going to Den City and coming here was that friends were still a bit hard. Yusaku had off handedly said he was charismatic once, but Takeru didn’t believe it. He didn’t really know what to make of that at all. _Yusaku_ thought he was charismatic? Did Yusaku have any idea how much charisma _he_ had as Playmaker? When he asked, Yusaku had only shrugged. 

Even if Takeru chose to believe it, what good did charisma do him if he didn’t have anyone he could feel really, _really_ honest with? He was doing much better than before, but even with dating Kiku, there were so many things he couldn’t tell her, couldn’t even begin to explain to her. He loved her, she knew he had been kidnapped as a child, but he couldn’t explain the mess that had made of his head, he couldn’t explain the Lost Incident and everything that had happened when he was in Den City. 

He loved her, but he couldn’t be honest with her, he couldn’t be honest with _anyone_ really, and it was a lonely feeling, even with people approaching him here and there. Fact of the matter was that he didn’t know how to explain any of this to anyone. He had felt a kinship with Yusaku because of this, but Yusaku held him at arm’s length. So while he was able to relax a bit with him, silent understanding between them when Takeru came in after a sleepless night and Yusaku would fall asleep in class, they never really became close. Or at least, he didn’t think they had, but maybe it was more that he never really understood Yusaku. 

_“Takeru.”_

_Takeru had nearly jumped out of his skin, seeing Yusaku at the gate that afternoon. Kusanagi had seen him off earlier, he hadn’t heard from Yusaku though._

_“Y-Yusaku? Did something happen?”_

_“No. I wanted to say goodbye, that’s all.”_

_Takeru stared at him. Was Yusaku being sentimental? Takeru knew that Yusaku cared about other people, he cared about them a lot, but it always seemed like it was much more the concept than it was about the connection. Had more of a connection grown between them than Takeru had realized?_

_“I need to tell you something else, too.” Yusaku continued, holding up the arm with his duel disk, “I’m going to find Ai.”_

_“Ai? But--”_

_“He’s scattered. There’s pieces of him in the network, and I’m going to find them.” The way Yusaku spoke with such absolute confidence, Takeru could barely breathe. If Ai was out there--_

_“I might be able to find fragments of the others too. I don’t know though.”_

_“Yusaku…” Takeru stared at him, stared at his eyes that always made him look like a deer in the headlights, but never held any of the meekness, “Why are you telling me this?”_

_After all, Yusaku never told Takeru much of anything, so why this?_

_Yusaku shrugged, looked away for a moment before meeting his eyes again, “I trust you.”_

_“You do?”_

_“I do. I have, and I want to trust you more, even if you’re leaving.”_

_“We might not see each other again.”_

_“Yeah. I know, but still.” Yusaku smiled just a little bit, and Takeru’s heart skipped a beat in his chest._

_“I’m glad I got to meet you, Takeru.”_

_The train was pulling in then, and Yusaku’s eyes fell on it, watching it as it slowed to a stop. Takeru shook his head, cleared his thoughts._

_“I--No, thank_ **_you_ ** _Yusaku. For everything, and for trusting me with this.”_

_Yusaku looked surprised for a moment before he smiled a little more than he had before. Maybe Takeru should’ve tried harder to get to know him, maybe he should’ve focused on Yusaku, the person that fell asleep in class and was terribly awkward and less on Playmaker, his idol. Maybe they could’ve been closer, maybe things could’ve gone differently, maybe Takeru wouldn’t be going home and maybe Yusaku wouldn’t be leaving to who knows where._

_“We should see each other again! Maybe next summer? I think you have my number and if you don’t, Kusanagi does, and I have yours and--”_

_“I’d like that.”_

_Takeru felt himself smile at that, and impulsively, he squeezed Yusaku into a brief but tight hug, feeling Yusaku stiffen but then relax. Takeru stepped back, gave him a wave as he made his way to the train doors._

_“Bye, Yusaku!”_

_“Bye, Takeru.”_

Takeru had messaged him a couple of times since then, not getting a response, which made sense. He didn’t know where Yusaku was, but if he was in the network, he wouldn’t have his phone of course. In the end, he ended up messaging Ryoken to ask if he’d heard from Yusaku, and ended up talking to him more from there. Takeru needed at least one person in his life, really, that understood everything he had been through. He didn’t have to explain things to Ryoken, and while it wasn’t quite the same as with Yusaku, who had been through that six months of hell as he had, it wasn’t bad at all. He felt a little less lonely talking to Ryoken, even if it was just to check in on him, make sure he wasn’t doing anything stupid.

The voice of his teacher dismissing class for lunch snapped Takeru out of his daze, his eyes falling on his very blank notebook. This wasn’t good. 

“You know, you’re gonna have a hard time studying if you don’t take any notes.” He looked up to meet Kiku’s eyes as she frowned at his notebook.

“Yeah… I uh… spaced out a bit, I guess.” He laughed sheepishly, she knocked lightly on his head. 

“More than a bit! I sit behind you, remember?” 

“How could I forget?”

Kiku giggled, put her notebook on top of his, “You can copy my notes if you give them back when lunch is over.” 

He felt a wave of relief, shoving aside the thoughts of _why bother_ that threatened to infiltrate. 

“You’re always bailing me out of one thing or another.”

“Someone has to!” She smiled, “Now come on, I don’t want to waste lunchtime in here.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” Takeru grabbed his lunch, grabbed her notebook and his and a pencil and stood to follow her. 

This kind of normal was strange, welcome but strange still. He was lucky to have her, he was lucky that she’d accepted when he asked her out. He was lucky and still there was a wall between them that he knew was entirely of his making. She was smart, pretty, incredibly capable and a decent cook (he was better, but she was _getting_ better as he taught her). He was lucky. 

Sitting on the roof with her and her friends, he inhaled his lunch while they talked, taking care not to get anything on her notebook. Once he was done, he spread them out on the rooftop, looking her notes over and beginning to copy them, doing his best to make sense of what she had written. He would inevitably ask for her help later, but hopefully he could follow most of this himself. He would readily admit that he wasn’t particularly smart, but being back in school he realized he wasn’t a _total_ idiot either. 

Notes copied, Kiku and her friends were absorbed in some kind of gossip. Some of this, Takeru would tune in on, but today it mostly seemed like self-admitted petty griping, so he tuned back out and pulled out his phone. 

Without much thought, Takeru opened the app that he used to talk to Ryoken and sent him a message. 

Commit any crimes today, Ryoken? Sent 2:33PM


	2. The First Steps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _The offer had been tempting, honestly, and would’ve been a little more tempting if Yusaku had only disappeared, and not _ **died**_. When Ai said it, he felt equal parts hope and horror at the thought of never being apart from Ai again, never experiencing those painful few weeks again. However, he didn’t want to stop being himself, he didn’t want Ai to stop being himself. Ai was Ai and Ai was who he came all that way for, Ai was the person he missed._

Yusaku loved Ai before he knew what love was. 

When he had been preparing to leave, he was startled by how many memories of Ai were in this apartment, between him and Roboppi watching dramas on his computer and the nights where Yusaku would wake up in a cold sweat, heart racing, and Ai would be there in bed with him, quick to talk to Yusaku, to ground him back in reality. Without Ai, he was startled by how _particularly_ lonely he was, in this specific way, for this specific person. 

Initially, Yusaku hadn’t planned on doing anything other than figure out how to mend his broken heart, or at the very least live with what that felt like, but the more he tried, the more his thoughts wandered and he wondered: _is Ai really gone?_

So he logged into VRAINS, explored and tapped into his link sense, testing what it could do and how far it would reach until his head hurt so much he threw up when he logged out. But he wouldn’t stop, back at it the next day after a little sleep. He listened, he looked, he hoped, and it wasn’t for nothing. Here and there, he found pieces of Ai’s data. Too fragmented to function alone, but Ai nonetheless. Drawing bit after bit of data into his duel disk, he couldn’t explain what this felt like, except that every piece _felt_ like Ai. He knew that even if he found more parts, he wouldn’t necessarily be able to do anything, Ai might still be gone forever, as mortal as Yusaku was, but that tiny bit of _hope_ filled in the cracks in his heart just a bit, just enough, that he couldn’t give up. 

However, there was a tug at times that pulled him towards these gates that had started appearing in VRAINS. Some of them he knew would just connect to the VRAINS hubs that had been made in other cities as of late, but others… Others were in spaces that were gated off from the rest of the users. When he tried to access them, he couldn’t get through either, no matter what he did.

He didn’t want to involve anyone else—his friends had done more than enough and this wasn’t their fight. This wasn’t something _they_ needed to do. If Ai were here, Yusaku was pretty sure he’d tell him it was okay to rely on friends, and any other time he would’ve had a point, but in this case? Yusaku couldn’t disrupt their lives the way he was about to disrupt his own. He was leaving, he was going to be gone and he didn’t know for how long. Aoi was doing well, as far as he could tell. Takeru had gone home, Kusanagi finally had his brother back, Ryoken was… not in jail. Yusaku wasn’t sure what he was up to. He didn’t know, he couldn’t ask. He didn’t trust Ryoken not to get involved and try to stop him. 

He would trust Ryoken with his life, sure, but this? No. 

So Yusaku was on his own for this, and he was fine with that. He was used to working alone, he had done it long enough that falling back on it was fairly effortless. It didn’t feel wrong, it didn’t feel isolating in the way that he was sure everyone thought it had. It was a simple mindset of having just himself to keep track of, and knowing he could be as reckless as he needed to. 

Maybe for others, it was an impossible thing to fathom being comfortable with, but not for him. 

Also in being on his own, it let him risk this very experimental thing he had found out from the data Ai had left behind in his SOLtiS. Ai was gone, but the files he had downloaded--the data he had stolen from SOL--was not. Yusaku had been hoping to pull _Ai_ from the data, but he would take what he could get. 

He had wondered for a moment, when Ai proposed them fusing, if that meant Yusaku would leave behind a body for someone to find. The data he found however, suggested otherwise. While Ai focused on the idea of fusing their consciousness, there were experiments in progress to dissolve an entire person down into data and rebuild them elsewhere. 

The offer had been tempting, honestly, and would’ve been a little more tempting if Yusaku had only disappeared, and not _died_. When Ai said it, he felt equal parts hope and horror at the thought of never being apart from Ai again, never experiencing those painful few weeks again. However, he didn’t want to stop being himself, he didn’t want Ai to stop being himself. Ai was Ai and Ai was who he came all that way for, Ai was the person he missed.

Today, Yusaku was testing this. The data he had found said that the gates had appeared from nowhere, no one had built them in. The ones that connected other hubs appeared on their own before SOL was ready for them to be there, and the others were more mysterious yet, labeled in the documents as gates to other worlds. The gates wouldn’t let a person’s avatar pass, but they might let a whole person through. 

Deeper in the documents, he learned that VRAINS had never been developed, really, it had been _found._ It was another world in itself.

He took only what he needed, walking through the quiet and familiar streets of Den City with nothing more than the clothes on his back and his duel disk. He might very well die doing this, become as scattered as Ai was, who _knew_ what. 

But Yusaku was willing to take this risk. 

This was the last chance he had to try this--to see if getting his entire self into VRAINS, leaving nothing of him behind, would let him pass through the gates. If he didn’t do it tonight, he’d miss his chance before the passwords started to change. 

He pulled his hood up, obscuring his face for whatever good it would do, and made his way to SOL. 

**/ / /**

Back on his yacht, Ryoken immediately set to work. Pulling the data that remained on the original unit, much of it came back corrupted, as had the data on the SOLtiS. Unsurprising, really, given how the Dark Ignis’ data had affected it, both causing it to expand and overload his circuits and also not fitting into place at all. 

He was going to have to start from the default Roboppi personality for this line of bots, and load in what he could over time and see if the AI could handle it and make use of the data. After all, it wouldn’t be much of a thank you to give Yusaku something that would only succeed in causing him more pain. Yusaku had more than suffered enough. 

Ryoken knew that he had been the cause of that countless times, between their first meeting all those years ago, and his mission to eradicate the ignis. He regretted ever having invited Yusaku to his house, but he didn’t regret the mission. It was unfair that Yusaku had had to suffer so much, but it would have been less fair if the simulations came to pass, and he had to live with the fact that for one boy’s comfort, he sacrificed billions of lives. As always, it came down to the needs of the many over the needs of the few, and Ryoken did what had to be done. 

His phone vibrated on his desk, breaking his train of thought. Unlocking it, he opened the message from Homura. It was strange to be talking to him off and on like this, but he couldn’t say that he minded it. It was nice, perhaps, to have others to talk to beyond the confines of this boat and beyond Hanoi. 

Commit any crimes today, Ryoken? Only a minor one.

Was it really a crime? He’d paid off the landlord, but it still wasn’t technically _his._

??? What did you do?!  Aren’t you supposed to NOT get in trouble? We weren’t caught. It’s a nonissue. RYOKEN What did you do?

Ryoken thought about it, wondering what Takeru would think of his plan to restore the cleaning robot. Would he be bothered? Would he be concerned? Would he be happy? Their duel had been a disturbing and heartbreaking one, to say the very least.

Just breaking into Yusaku’s apartment. ????????????????? I’m seeing if I can restore his cleaning robot.

A reply didn’t come for a long moment, before the typing notification appeared on the screen, stopped and started again.

I thought you didn’t trust AIs. I think it’s smart to be wary of them. 

Ryoken thought about it another moment before tapping out another reply.

If I’m able to restore this one, there will be fail safes in place to make sure it doesn’t decide to treat humans like RPG enemies again. Oh.

Ryoken’s phone didn’t buzz again after that. No typing, nothing. Possibly, Takeru did not like the idea of Ryoken putting any kind of limiter on the AIs, but well, they didn’t need to agree. Ryoken would do what he needed to do, he didn’t need approval from someone who was much more about feelings than he was about being logical. 

Though it would be a lie if Ryoken claimed that he _didn’t_ like that about Takeru. He didn’t know why he did, he shouldn’t, it was the kind of thing that got Yusaku into trouble, it was the kind of thing that got Takeru killed when they fought Bohman. Logically, he wasn’t thinking clearly, he shouldn’t have continued that duel when his ignis had just died in front of him. 

Nonetheless, something in Ryoken had decided that such behavior was admirable. Which didn’t make sense, but without a war on the horizon, without the end of the world (or Japan at the very least) on the horizon, he was willing to tolerate his impulses more than he had in the past. 

He turned his attention back to his computer, bored and annoyed immediately when he saw that the firmware for the bot was _still_ compiling. Technology was abhorrent. What good was it to get everything top of the line if it _still_ took this long? 

He eyed the SOLtiS body that was shut down in the corner of his office, looking harmless, like it was sleeping standing up and not something that had once cheerfully talked about killing people.

He remembered watching the bot malfunction, slowly implode on itself, before Takeru landed the final attack on him, and felt vaguely _bad_ that this thing had developed enough to destroy itself. It wasn’t alive, not really, but he had to wonder if it felt a simulation of fear in its final moments. 

This was stupid. He was thinking too much about this thing that was definitely not a person in any capacity _like_ it was a person, and while Ryoken would indulge some of his stupid impulses right now, this would not be one of them. 

He was going to install the default software in this stupid SOLtiS, with some additions to let it do _more_ servant-like duties, and he would do nothing more. He would give Yusaku his stupid cleaning robot if it remembered him, and toss the whole thing into the ocean if it didn’t and put the original body back where he found it as though it had never happened. 

He would make sure that Takeru didn’t tell Yusaku either. No need to give Yusaku false hope if this thing just was rotting at the bottom of the ocean.

In the meantime, he had the network to be monitoring. He wasn’t going to stare at this loading bar for the next ten hours.


End file.
